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Personal Ancestry Writer II (PAWriter II) version 48

Howard Metcalfe has released Personal Ancestry Writer II (PAWriter II) version 48 (4 Dec 2005). PAWriter II is a Mac (MacOS 8.6/9 or Mac OS X ) genealogy application that has most of the features found in the original Personal Ancestry File (PAF) for Mac, as well as additional publishing features (HTML/Web, word processing, desktop publishing (DTP)).

Additions: * New menu item, File > Write HTML > Pedigree of This Person. It produces an HTML file containing a pedigree of the current person and all of his/her ancestors that are on file. The pedigree is formatted in the same text-oriented way as is a web site pedigree. For very extensive pedigrees, PAWriter might take a while to produce the file. This menu item is disabled if the current person has no ancestors.Note: When printing the pedigree from your browser, select any option to “shrink pages to fit.” In Internet Explorer or Netscape, this option is available from the File > Print Preview menu item. This option ensures that the pedigree will fit on one page across, with one or more pages down.

*Preference for breaking long GEDCOM notes between non-space characters (GEDCOM 5.5 standard for CONC lines). Previous versions of PAWriter broke those lines on a space character (non-standard but frequently used). Be sure to use the same method both when you export a GEDCOM file and then import that file. If you don’t, extra spaces will appear or valid spaces will disappear in the notes.

Other Changes: The Preferences window was rearranged and some other changes made The other changes are minor features to enhance GEDCOM processing. These technical changes are: -> Changed import of children to use only FAM CHIL lines (ignoring redundant INDI FAMC lines), and to note an error if a child already has parents. -> Took out extra quotes in nicknames on import. -> Permitted commas within nicknames. -> Removed terminal periods in place name pieces and expanded Co, Twp, Par, etc. at the end of place name pieces on import. -> Made sure a space appears after any periods within person surnames and given names and within place names on import and entry. -> Permitted parenthesis in person and place names on import and entry. -> Permitted INDI SEX U on import, indicating an unknown gender. -> Generated only one error on import for untranslated characters, CHAN lines and _UID lines.

The Reference Guide was updated to reflect these changes. (By the way, a possibly helpful hint: the files in the Reference guide folder can be opened in your browser at any time, and any referenced images will appear within the page. They are just simple HTML files. But don’t change their names — the Reference Guide within PAWriter depends on the sequence of their names.)